This invention relates to a method and system for measuring an emotional response to a chosen focus and more particularly to a method and system for producing objective data reflecting the extraction of personal idiosyncrasies from a standard subjective reaction in order to more accurately predict action to be taken by an individual subject or the normative population in response to the chosen focus.
Heretofore, several approaches for measuring emotion to infer action have been tried. The idiosyncratic nature of self reporting has led to a general disregard of subjective reports. With objective checklists and other forced choice questionnaire formats, emotion prediction data has proven extremely sensitive to psychological expectations and demand characteristics of the procedures. Focus groups traditionally rely on exceptional individuals to function as facilitators. Inevitably, the strengths of the facilitator run aground on group dynamics, semantic ambiguity, and difficulties in generalizing to the whole population.
Efforts to utilize subconscious emotion rely on projective techniques whereby the individual subject recognizes and identifies emotions evoked by an ambiguous stimulus or situation. An ambiguous stimulus is any object that evokes a variety of spontaneous thoughts or feelings. Examples of projective techniques include word association, sentence completion, cartoon completion, and role playing. The Rorschach Inkblot Test and the Thematic Apperception Test are standardized projective techniques which generate common responses to ambiguous dark figures on a light background that are valuable to clinicians familiar with in depth mental processes and interpersonal themes. The meanings of these responses to these ambiguous stimuli and situations are only variably recognized by the individual subject. The useful information produced is limited by its not being validatable by the individual subject as representing his true and whole response to the chosen focus. The predictive information produced is limited by the weak quantifiability of the data and the presence of transient and idiosyncratic emotional elements. The absence of a baseline that might control for these elements greatly reduces the ability to predict action and fails to justify generalizing from the individual to predict behavior in a normative population.
Another problem encountered in measuring emotion is that, in general, individual resistance to emotion in society is profound, as most people strive to control and suppress emotions because they are too frequently unreliable, impulsive, irrational, overwhelming, and deep. This problem is, in effect, linked to unconscious mental processes that are dimly understood.
Traditional unconscious psychology presents a no win situation regarding emotion. It precludes any confidence in a less deep grounding of emotion because explicitly and implicitly there exist always deeper and truer emotions. Empirical approaches to emotion have not thrived with current introspective and projective techniques. However, the realm of preconscious emotion, that emotion which is unappreciated but recognizable, represents an accessible domain for empirical exploration of spatial and temporal characteristics of emotion. Computer processing technology can enable empirical studies to establish preconscious emotion as a reference level for a more popular appreciation of the role of emotion occurring throughout the broad range of human endeavors.
It is therefore a principal object of the present invention to provide a method and system for measuring emotional response that reliably produces objective and predictive data regarding human behavior.
It is a further object of the present invention to provide a method and system for measuring emotional response that is engaging, non-threatening, and infinitely forgiving for the broad range of potential styles that individual subjects might employ in an interactive setting.
Another object of the present invention is to provide a method and system for measuring emotional response that enables a time-bound graphing of individual emotions for developing a preconscious baseline that characterizes the individual subject and for extracting the baseline from a standard subjective reaction of the subject to a chosen focus to derive a clarified intensity of emotion that is predictive of action to be taken by the individual subject or, by logical extension, the normative population.
Still another object of the present invention is to provide a method and system for measuring emotional response that will accumulate preconscious baseline profiles of individuals, families, and groups and their clarified responses to a variety of focuses to develop innovative profiles of segments of the whole population in a database.